NEW YORK — Meta Platforms shares surged on Wednesday after reports that the company is developing a cloud infrastructure business that could sell artificial intelligence computing capacity and AI models to outside customers, a move investors viewed as a potential way to generate returns from the company's massive AI spending.
The stock rose nearly 9% during the session, marking one of its strongest daily gains in more than a year, after Bloomberg reported that Meta is exploring plans to commercialize portions of its AI infrastructure through a business internally known as Meta Compute. The plans remain under development and could change, according to people familiar with the matter cited in the report. Meta declined to comment publicly on the report.
According to the report, Meta is considering multiple approaches, including selling access to AI models hosted on its infrastructure or leasing raw computing capacity to enterprise customers. Such a business would place the social media company in competition with established cloud providers including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, as well as AI infrastructure specialists such as CoreWeave and Nebius.
Investors have closely scrutinized Meta's heavy investment in AI infrastructure, with the company committing between $125 billion and $145 billion in capital expenditures during 2026 to expand data centers, networking equipment and advanced chips supporting its AI ambitions. Analysts said the prospect of generating revenue from infrastructure that might otherwise remain underutilized could help address concerns about the financial returns on those investments.
Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg had previously indicated that commercializing computing capacity was a possibility. At the company's shareholder meeting in May, Zuckerberg said offering excess computing resources through cloud services was "definitely on the table" if Meta ultimately built more infrastructure than it required for its own operations.
The report also reverberated across the broader AI infrastructure sector. Shares of cloud infrastructure providers including CoreWeave and Nebius fell sharply as investors weighed the prospect of a new large-scale competitor entering the market. Semiconductor stocks also came under pressure amid concerns that the move could signal a less constrained supply of AI computing capacity than previously anticipated.
Analysts remained divided over the implications of the reported plans. Some viewed the initiative as a practical way to monetize expensive infrastructure without reducing Meta's AI ambitions, while others questioned whether the company would have sufficient excess capacity to support external customers given its own growing AI demands. No launch timeline or final business model has been announced.
